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A majority of human resource executives report that their inability to attract and retain middle-skills talent frequently affects their firm’s performance. Middle-skills jobs, those that require more than a high school diploma, less than a four-year college degree, and pay above the national living wage, account for nearly half of labor demanded in the United States. As technology transforms the workplace, digital skills are becoming increasingly important and in higher demand. In today’s dynamic workforce, managers are facing managing and developing interdisciplinary and multilevel teams while combating a technical skills divide (lack of qualified workers), making it difficult to recruit and retain a high-technology, middle-skill-level workforce. This chapter focuses on addressing unique challenges relevant to recruitment, upskilling, and management best practices as they relate to the integration of technology and middle-skill-level workers in a highly successful workplace.

Economic stressors such as job insecurity, job loss, unemployment, and underemployment cause severe difficulties for the workers affected, their families, organizations, and societies overall. Consequently, most past research has taken a thoroughly negative perspective on economic stress, addressing its diverse negative consequences and the ways that people try to cope with them. And even when following the advice provided by the scientific literature, people affected by economic stress will usually end up being off worse than they were before the onset of the stressor.

The current chapter pays credit to this perspective yet also tries to counterbalance it with an alternative one. While acknowledging the vast amount of literature outlining the negative consequences of economic stress on peoples’ well-being and careers, some literature also points at opportunities for a more positive perspective. More specifically, we argue that affected people can use a wide repertoire of behaviors for handling their current situation. Of particular promise in this regard is the concept of career adaptability, generally defined as the ability to change to fit into new career-related circumstances. Indeed, studies show that under certain conditions, career adaptability can facilitate people's search for not just any job but for a qualitatively better job, thus breaking through the spiral of losses usually associated with economic stress.

For the purpose of this argument, we link career adaptability to the concept of proactive coping, analyzing how and under which conditions career adaptability may present a contextualized form of proactive coping. We then address known personal and situational antecedents of career adaptability and show how career adaptability may be fostered and trained among different types of job seekers. We end this chapter with a discussion of open questions as well as directions for future research.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of SIEs’ career development through international assignment. In particular, the research focus is on career capital acquirement and development of SIEs through their international assignment in China.

We review studies on SIEs and comparative studies between SIEs and OEs. We apply the career capital theory to discuss SIEs’ career capital development in terms of knowing-how, knowing-why and knowing-whom through expatriation assignment in China.

This chapter focuses on SIEs’ career capital accumulation through international assignments in China, and we develop three propositions that will guide future studies: the knowing-whom career capital development of SIEs through expatriation is increased more in network quantity than network quality in China; the knowing-why career capital development of SIEs through expatriation is influenced by the age and career stage of SIEs; and the knowing-how career capital development of SIEs through expatriation — task-related skills and local engagement skills — is influenced by the SIE’s intercultural ability and organization support respectively.

In practice, a better understanding of SIEs’ career capital development in terms of knowing-how, knowing-why and knowing-whom help companies make the decision to select the relevant staffing pattern. This study also has practical implications in relation to the design and selection of the training, learning and development activities provided to the employees.

The chapter contributes to the expatriate management literature by focusing on SIEs’ career development through their international assignment in China. SIEs’ career development is related to their cross-cultural adjustment and has impacts on the completion and success of the expatriation assignment.

In this study, the concept of career, which is one of the most significant functions of human resources, is examined. Toward the end of the twentieth century, restricted models, in which individuals work in a workplace in a classical manner, have been replaced by more flexible models. Due to certain reasons such as changing environmental conditions, increasing education levels, and the impact of employee’s values on his/her work life, individuals’ work life have been dramatically changed. Therefore, some career approaches oriented for these changing conditions and current requirements have been proposed by both academicians and professionals. These approaches mostly include removing workplace limits, offering the opportunity to work from anywhere, using various skills at different departments without any limitations. Basing on the aforementioned changes in theory and practice, this study investigates up-to-date career approaches in a holistic manner. In this context, the background and practicability of these theoretically framed approaches are also discussed in the present study

As high school and college graduates enter today's highly competitive and diverse, globalized economies, cultural competence and social and emotional learning (SEL) competencies continue being essential skills for college, career, and life success. These capabilities are more than valuable assets, they are employability requirements in a modern workforce dependent on navigating relationships and interactions between people from different backgrounds. In education, educators are increasingly expected to cultivate these skills within equitable learning environments for all students, international and domestic. Recent research demonstrates greater need to support international students in the United States who often experience unique academic barriers, stressors, and lack of support services for managing international relocation and integration into unfamiliar academic and cultural systems. To better understand how culturally responsive SEL education can serve as a lever for increasing equitable conditions for international students and to contribute research-based practices on how distance learning can strengthen culturally responsive SEL skills, the following chapter introduces how one online academic and cultural studies course influenced high school and undergraduate international students. Through qualitative and quantitative sources (e.g., written homework reflections; cultural orientation indicator (COI) report; paper: My Action Plan; course evaluation survey), themes emerged from the data that identified how explicit online SEL education, using a culturally responsive lens, contributed to gains in cultural competence, educational equity, academic and professional development, and self-efficacy.